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The reviews published here in the blog are but a few of those I write for Amazon. I republish here because these books leave dangling philosophical implications, interesting to me, that isn't appropriate to note in a book review. But few books reviewed and commented upon here give me as much dangling bait as this one. As always, the full Amazon review and link to the book are included below.
Flanagan says there are two moral roots, biology (evolution) and culture. He is missing the third root, human mind's contact with spirit, a concept I promise to flesh out below. Here I will say that this contact has nothing to do with the pronouncements, moral or otherwise, of existing religious institutions, but with a property unique to human mind.
Consider this: humans murder other humans. We say this is wrong (the inverse of right) and perhaps evil, the inverse of good. Every human society on earth avers this moral principle with few exceptions permitted. War is one exception nearly, but not entirely, universal. "Honor killings" among some peoples who do not deserve the appellation "civilized" (I am not even as much a moral relativist as Flanagan) is another if rarer exception. Chimpanzees, it is well documented, also sometimes murder other chimpanzees. Yet, we, that is humans, do not think of this as wrong. We say that chimpanzees are amoral. Being mere animals (though we share 98% of our DNA with them) they are not, we say, able to tell right from wrong.
Why, having emerged (biologically) from the animals, do humans possess a conviction (which animals do not) that there exists a right and a wrong, a good and an evil? I refer here not to any conviction about specific wrongs, even murder. Apart from murder, there are numerous (as Flanagan so well shows us) culturally varying ideas of rights and wrongs. Why are humans in particular convinced that such things as rights and wrongs, or moral better and worse, in the abstract exist? I am not referring here to phenomenal experiences whether pleasurable or painful. As organisms we are biologically directed towards pleasure and away from pain. This is true of animals in some ways even more than humans. But only humans come to attach a moral facet to the experience, a conviction not only that I like pleasure more than pain, but that there is an abstract moral quality to pleasure lacking, or inverted, in pain.
The conviction cannot come from biology. We are animals. Could the 2% difference between our DNA and chimpanzees alone explain it? That 2% has a lot to do. We do not, after all, look much like Chimpanzees. Surely, the ubiquitous (at least widespread) belief in rightness and wrongness, a moral direction, lends itself to the fitness of larger, more complex societies. Yet Darwinian selection pressure comes (as we know) from outside the organism, even the community of organisms. If the conviction that a moral direction exists, exerts selection pressure, the conviction cannot be an illusion. If we merely "make it up" (the conviction is illusion), yet more of those humans who have it pass on their genes, we have a case, contra Darwin, in which fantasy, having no mind-independent counterpart, is biologically adaptive!
What about culture? Of course, our specific notions of right and wrong are cultural. But the cultural evolution of moral specificities presupposes the belief in a moral direction, a better and worse.. Chimpanzees have been around on earth much longer than humans. They live in complex (for animals) societies. Yet, they have not evolved any socially-determined moral specificities other than the default "rule of the strongest male".
The moral particulars Flanagan so eloquently describes evolve from both biology and society. But the conviction that there ought to be moral particulars (and vaguely the direction particulars take over historical time) comes from the human mind's sensitivity to, apperception of, values: truth, beauty, and goodness. Like morality abstractly as compared to specifics, the values are not the truth of particular propositions, or the beauty-content of particular configurations of the material world, or what particular acts, people, or concepts (like justice) are good. They are, rather, pointers in the direction of such things. They constitute our only phenomenal access to spirit, which from the human viewpoint, comes out to sensitivity to the moral quality of God's character.
Take justice (civil, economic, or criminal) for example. All cultures revere justice, and while what constitutes justice varies greatly between cultures, most strive for something resembling fairness which, in its turn, is also expressed in various ways. The vast majority of the world community would say that summary execution, the "justice" of Islamic terrorists, is not really justice at all, and they would be right.
Justice is not the value "goodness". Rather, justice has goodness if a particular expression of it has something of the flavor of that value. Perhaps (in a criminal context), life imprisonment for a capital crime is more just (has more goodness) than execution. But execution after a fair and honest trial based on indubitable evidence is more just than summary execution! It isn't the particular, nor even the concept "justice" that is supplied by our phenomenal experience of values, rather the conviction that there is something called goodness, and justice has [at least] some of it. From the human viewpoint, goodness is absolute only in the limited sense that it is mind-independently real. Our sensitivity to spirit has but the barest inkling of value-flavors as these would seem from God's viewpoint, while the goodness content of anything (abstract or otherwise), as perceived by us, is a judgement of individual mind and subject to the relativity of individual (and socio-cultural) perspective.
I have written extensively on this. For a deeper discussion of the relation between values and mind see "From what comes Mind", and "What are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness" among other articles. Here I sketch the briefest summary of it all. There is a field in spacetime that, in conjunction with brains, is the source of mind, that is phenomenal consciousness, the "what is it like to be.." experience. The richness of consciousness is proportional to the capacity of the underlying brain. Mammals, richer than reptiles, dogs, cats, and some birds, richer than mice, and chimpanzees richer than all the rest, except the human. The richness of the human experience includes sensitivity to the values, to spirit, something transparent to animal minds, and it is this sensitivity that constitutes the conviction that there is a "moral direction", that some specific moralities are (or can be) theoretically better (meaning more true, beautiful, and good) than others.
The conviction that there is a moral direction does not automatically (or even often after much thought) produce correct judgments concerning the value-content of particulars. There are, even between cultures, often broad agreements over the truth, goodness, or beauty of particulars. Just as often there are disagreements over which morality has "more goodness", which artform or natural phenomenon "more beautiful", of what human notions of the universe are "more true". In our day to day, culturally embedded experience, we agree (mostly) on only two things: the particulars are relative (even within a culture), and yet values have an absolute quality to them.
Think of an old fashioned magnetic compass. The pointer never locks-on to "the north" (leaving aside "magnetic north") but floats vaguely in its direction. Looking at a compass, we never know exactly in what direction lies north, but it does give us an approximate direction, and by implication (the needle is not completely random), a philosophical reason to believe that "the north" exists.
Truth, beauty, and goodness are properties of the universe (not merely the physical universe which would make beauty the only value) whose reality we apperceive. We do not merely make them up, individually or collectively. We do "make up" the particulars, individually for ourselves, and collectively for society. The particulars are relative, to each other, and to the direction of the value pointer. Some particulars are "better than" others because they better reflect what we sense of the reality of truth, beauty, and goodness.
What moral thinkers down through the ages have noticed is that particulars chosen because they are more aligned with [what we perceive to be] the value compass tend to have better and longer-lasting social outcomes. It is also true that the conviction of truth, beauty, and goodness's reality, their objectivity, does not impart objectivity to our evaluation of their instantiation in particulars. The reality of a value direction is, like the material world, independent of human mind, though it is sensed, on earth, only in human mind. Moral particulars emerge (socially and individually) when social situations arise that appear to involve sensed values, particularly, in the case of morals, goodness.
Theism, grounding value apperception, is the tool Flanagan needs to complete his project.
It explains why humans can be moral, immoral, and amoral, while even the most advanced animals only have the last.
It explains the direction (however slowly things change) of moral evolution in human communities. It gives him his "ought from is", not in detail (particular moralities) but as concerns their general direction towards more truth, beauty, and goodness.
It provides the reason for individual moral striving by answering the "why should I" question. In the long run, we are not dead. This life is but a phase of a much larger project in which we personally continue to participate.
I have not here discussed personal survival of material death (an implication of my theism, see "Prolegomena for a Future Theology" and "What is the Soul?"), but I note that Flanagan's favorite alternate cultural example, Buddhism, answers this same question with reincarnation. According to the Karma doctrine, we are all living in something like John Rawls' ("A Theory of Justice" 1971) "original position". None of us know into what social status we are reborn (analogous to "Pascal's wager"). Wise in this life to follow a moral course that maximizes our chance for a good (in the sense of less onerous) "next incarnation".
The Geography of Morals by Owen Flanagan (2019 reprint).
Some might see this book as an apology for moral relativism. It is not that, exactly, but does struggle with that notion because Dr. Flanagan cannot quite get what he wants here. What he wants is an appreciation for the utility and value (to human-well-being) of various moral particulars as found in cultures around the world. In addition, he wants to select out of this collection those particulars that are good for humanity as a whole, where "goodness" is not measured solely from the viewpoint of any particular culture nor by utility alone.
He cannot get what he wants, because the cultures chosen to illustrate his points are themselves selected from a certain range of what is, to us steeped in Western European culture, already acceptable. The Buddhist doctrine of "no-self" and its moral implications is acceptable, as is ancient Roman Stoicism. By contrast, leaving unwanted babies exposed to the elements to die (also ancient Roman practice), or Wahabbist beheading of infidels, is not.
The book is divided into three parts. In the first, the author explores what he takes to be the two-roots-of-morality: biological evolution to human status with all its attendant adaptations for survival for the first nine-hundred-and-ninety-thousand years of human existence, and the cultural (social) accretions of the last ten-thousand years. This allows him to identify what he calls the moral or ethical "possibility space". Yet (as he admits throughout the book) from these two alone he cannot identify an unambiguous "ought from is" (a well-known conundrum introduced by David Hume in the 18th Century) without the selection bias introduced by his chosen examples.
In the book's middle third Flanagan chooses one emotion, anger (with manifest roots in biology), and explores its moral possibilities across his cultural examples. Anger, however, is one of the negative emotions that all cultures understand is better limited (at least) under normal circumstances. The issue in focus here is whether anger, its expression, is ever morally justified, a virtue. It is easy enough to construct examples in which some action, taken "in anger", results in a genuinely just outcome. Yet Flanagan understands that every culture seeks either to extirpate anger or at least to limit its expression, and that such expression as might be permitted makes sense only, if at all, because of some prior circumstance that warrants anger in the first place! The moral complications engendered by negative emotions like anger are good perhaps for cross-cultural comparisons, but not very good at helping to understand the more limited variation in positive moral virtues like compassion which seem universally to be welcome.
In the final third the author returns to the theme of finding some universal "oughts" from the combination of biological (which the world shares) and cultural roots. He shows us that, broadly speaking, almost every culture agrees that it is better for all if each individual is kind, honest, just, compassionate, and so on rather than envious, hateful, insincere, and selfish. He also uses this section to explore the implications of concepts of the self to moral motivation, But he can never answer the question of why, exactly, I should choose this "better course" if, in my personal opinion, I am better off (economically, politically, sexually, whatever) doing bad? He puts his finger right on the heart of the problem: there can be no ultimate answer if, as J. M. Keynes noted, "in the long run, we are all dead".
Flanagan does what he can with the tools he has. Although he does address religion in the context of cultural and social forces, like Keynes, he believes that in the end, we are all dead, and this belief, shared by the vast majority of his peers, leaves him with little more than some interesting cultural comparisons, a description of, as he calls it, the "moral possibility space". I will address the tool he lacks, and its implications for biology, culture, and morality in my blog.
By Quine Atalin Book Reviews January 20, 2021 January 21, 2021 2,371 WordsLeave a comment
In 2014 William Dembski published "Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information" what he calls (in the introduction) a capstone on a trilogy that began with "The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities" (1998) and continued with "No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence" (2001). In the first two books Dembski spends his time building an argument about the unlikelihood of even simple life's "information content" assembling itself accidentally on the Earth of some 3 to 4 billion years past.
Considering the Earth could only have supported any conceivable life as recently as 4 billion years ago, life appeared rather soon after supportive conditions developed. Dembski concludes (and you can read the books to follow the math) the probability of that much information assembling itself in that little time is about 1 x 10^-150. The same basic principles hold true for life's evolution to its present forms adding an extraordinary amount of extra information along the way. Dembski understands Darwinian mechanisms. He carefully evaluates their capacity to assemble such an information pyramid by accident given the possible range of chemical interactions that occur among all the molecules of the nascent biological Earth on up to the present day. He shows again that it is incredibly unlikely for evolution to have been nothing but an accidental combination of mutation and selection.
In his third book Dembski goes on the offensive and focuses not on the unlikelihood of accidental life and evolution to present forms, but its impossibility. He does this by adding to his previous analysis a principle understood and accepted by today's physics community; "Conservation of Information". The concept is simple enough. A given system of mass-energy with boundary conditions (including energy flow) cannot express more information than was put into it somewhere.
To see how this all plays out over the history of the universe is the purpose of this essay. Dembski misses something important by leaving open when exactly the information needed to specify life (and next evolution) is added. Dembski happens to believe in a Christian God so he has no problem with the idea of information added to the world at life's origin. But he leaves open the possibility the information comes not from God, but perhaps aliens. Also open is the notion the necessary information was there at the beginning, at the big bang, leading to a panpsychism, or for that matter that we are living in a computer simulation (another version of aliens) adding information as the code grinds on.
What Dembski misses (or fails to appreciate properly) is that the fundamental discoveries of physics point to a late introduction of the information needed to assemble genuine life. It is my aim here to fill in that gap. Beyond this, Dembski goes on to note that our only experience of information-creation or addition to the world is our own intelligent designs. If information is conserved, and its only source is intelligence, the universe's initial information must come from some intelligence somewhere. Again this leaves open the possibility of super-aliens, computer simulation, or God. If Dembski is right that information is conserved, then either the universe's information originates in some intelligence or it was all there from its beginning. If it was there from the beginning, if it was a part of the physical universe at the big bang, where in physics is it found? Does what physics finds at the beginning provide for everything from stars to conscious observers?
Information as understood by physics is of three types, Shannon information, Kolmogorov information, and semantic information. I review these more extensively in my books. A brief summary will do here. Information in all these forms is exclusionary. A hypothetically information-less collection of matter energy, displaying no behavioral regularities, contains within itself a well-nigh infinite potential of future possible states. But there is no such collection because the nature of matter-energy and the regularities we observe depend on information. Information, beginning with its first expression in "natural law", restricts present potentials and future possibilities. Our universe, its fundamental material regularities, allows everything from black holes to consciousness, but the possible future states of a present state anywhere in the universe, or for the whole universe, are not infinite.
On a cosmic scale, the specific history of our universe cannot have been much different than it was given its initial information. A stable universe of undifferentiated energy, mint-jelly, or Boltzman brains is ruled out of genuinely possible histories. Information configures matter-energy in some way. This is an important characteristic or property of information, more particularly its causal effect on matter-energy, and is understood and accepted by modern physics.
Claude Shannon developed formula for computing the quantity of information that could be unambiguously (clearly received) over a communication channel having a certain bit rate (number of detectable state changes per second) and some amount of noise. No information channel is noise free in the real world thanks to the second law of thermodynamics. Shannon information isn't about any particular message, but about how much message a channel can carry. Capacity might be measured over time as it is in digital communications and radios, or in some other measure, for example the length of a DNA segment or a chromosome. The exclusion principle comes in trivially here. A particular message on a channel excludes other messages on that same channel at the same time or in the same place.
Kolmogorov information is about the complexity of a message. The message BBBBBBB is less complex than the message BCADFGE. We can re-write the first as 7B while the second requires all 7 characters in the correct order. Notice that the message FGCBAED is a different message but has exactly the same complexity as BCADFGE. Something like CCCABBF is intermediate in complexity because 3CA2BF requires only 6 characters to specify a 7 character message. Again we note the exclusivity property. Any one message of any complexity excludes all others.
Semantic information concerns what a message (information) means. Normally associated with human mind semantic information is plausibly characteristic of consciousness in general. Life, even without consciousness, displays metaphorical meaning. This meaning is metaphorical because life doesn't apprehend it. Rather meaning is imputed to life by consciousness, and seemingly always by human consciousness. Importantly to physics, there is no semantic meaning, metaphorical or otherwise, in nonliving, material process. The purposelessness of material mechanism reflects its lack of semantic meaning. "Purposeless mechanism" and "absence of semantic meaning" are two sides of the same coin.
Information expresses itself, one way or another by configuring matter-energy whether the flow of electrons on a wire, persisting patterns, or a recognition of significance (meaning) of a configuration to consciousness. We are now in a position to understand the connection between information, life, and the big bang.
Information, the potential-reducing patterning of some chunk of matter-energy, expresses itself differently depending on boundary conditions, and energy flows. Boundary conditions reflect information in the wider chunk of matter-energy that has causal input on expression in the bounded chunk. Theoretically that would be everything in the past light cone of the inner most bounded chunk, but this is often so vast a space and time that we ignore most of it. The word 'chunk' here refers to the matter-energy of some particular region of space and through some bounded time. Every expansion of view to wider and wider spacetime chunks encompasses more matter-energy configured by information whose expression is in turn influenced by even wider chunks. 'Causal effect' is a function of forces, fields, with which matter-energy both brings about and with which it interacts. For my purposes, it matters not whether we view matter-energy as the product of fields (as in quantum field theory) or fields as a product of more fundamental matter (charged particles). Both views rest on the same fundamental information.
The first boundary conditions of our universe are the particular qualities of the forces describable in information theoretic terms. These forces restrict what can happen at any given "next instant". When we gaze into the heavens what we see, the stars, galaxies, clusters, clusters of clusters, interlocking streams of clusters going on as far as our telescopes can peer. At the largest scales, distribution of these substructures appears random, but just inside the largest scale, there is clearly an expressed arrangement. The matter-energy of the universe is not distributed randomly at all scales. Our particular arrangement, can be described as a measure of complexity; Kolmogorov information. That state, any given "state of the universe", changes into new states. The entire universe has a capacity, a limit, at which the evolving information expression advances. There is a limit to the rate at which change in the universe takes place. The universe has a Shannon information limit.
Cosmologists and physicists have long recognized the structures of the universe are, over-all, a natural outworking of a tension between positive energy expressed as temperature and pressure and negative energy known by its more common name, gravity. A cold cloud of hydrogen gas and dust floating around in space has more entropy than the star which eventually forms from it. It is gravity (negative energy) that reduces entropy in the gas cloud by consolidating it, restricting the freedom of its individual atoms to be anywhere in the much larger region of space that was the cold cloud. At cosmic scales, gravity is the great reducer of entropy. It does this by folding space around mass. Mass migrates inward (falls) toward the center of the folding which happens to be always what we call the "center of gravity".
Taking entropy out of a system like this makes it more difficult for photons to escape it. Folding space compresses electromagnetic forces (constraining photons) heating the contracting gas producing more rapid particle motion, raising temperature, and increasing pressure. Eventually the gas heats up enough that fusion occurs and the resulting release of positive energy balances ever-present negative gravitational energy. But why does the balancing out occur here at this point? Why isn't gravity strong enough to overcome fusion and keep folding space until a black hole forms more or less immediately?
The balance occurs at fusion, and gravity and pressure combine to make all the structures of the physical universe, thanks to the cosmological settings. The causal regularities we call "natural law" rest on the settings. The settings (there are some 20 of these seemingly arbitrary values among them the "cosmological constant", the value of the "Higgs field", the "fine structure constant", and the "proton-electron mass ratio") limit the ways in which matter-energy can interact. The particular interactions that occur are a reflection of the settings under boundary conditions holding at any given place and time. The settings are the minimal information present at or shortly after the big bang.
The star balanced at fusion expresses the same information as the cold gas cloud from which it formed. Both are deterministic expressions, patterning in behavior, of the same settings. At the opposite end of the size scale from stars, at the building blocks of matter (the fundamental particles of the present Standard Model) to molecules the same settings restrict behavior. At the small scales the important forces are the electromagnetic (molecular scale), and the strong/weak forces (nuclear scale). The same settings pattern matter on a different scale from the cosmological under differently relevant, microscopic, boundary conditions.
When mass-energy at a macroscopic scale is somewhere in thermodynamic equilibrium its state expresses the information present in the settings under that equilibrium. For the expression to change, to evolve, boundary conditions must change. That change rests causally on the flow of energy through the system. Change is also inextricably bound up with time. The seemingly simple notion of time is anything but simple. Is time something fundamental, perhaps even more fundamental than space (Unger/Smolin "The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time" 2014), or does it emerge from (and amount to) an averaging (as temperature is an averaging of molecular velocity) of the change in the quanta of space (Carlo Rovelli "Things Are Not as they Seem" 2016)? Does time exist at all, perhaps being nothing more than a meaning (semantic information) consciousness associates with measuring the rate of change (Julian Barbour "The End of Time" 1999). For purposes of this essay, nothing depends on this controversy. Time, one way or another, is an ingredient of every boundary condition and energy flow throughout the universe at all scales.
Significantly, when change occurs ordered patterns emerge. A star is ordered in this way compared with a gas cloud We note the same phenomena in columns of bubbles rising in the simmering water in a pot. The ordering in all of these cases is the result of a coupling between the settings, the boundary conditions, and energy flow. For my purposes below, I lump energy flow into the boundary conditions but the reader should always be aware that if changes in information expression are occurring, energy is somewhere flowing through the system. There are a few scientists who claim this emergence of order is enough to explain the eventual appearance of life, but this cannot be true. As I discuss below, life exhibits a new kind of ordering that never appears in non-living phenomena; and ordering requiring information not present in the settings directly though of course it remains consistent with them.
All the phenomena of the universe from the layout of the galaxies and down to the behavior of atoms in crystals and amino acids directly express cosmological settings under different boundary conditions, and these in turn also rest on the settings. The settings are the information present at (or within a second) of the big bang. They are information because they do what information does, they restrict or exclude possibilities by constraining what they pattern. The behavior of quarks, protons, neutrons, electrons, or the effect of gravity, isn't random. The settings restrict the values of the forces and those constrain the behavior of everything else from quarks to superclusters.
The limits, patterns of behavior, vary as conditions change, the changes themselves "caused" (some would prefer "unfold into") by those same regularities. Two seconds after the big bang all the settings were already in place. The strong, weak, and electrostatic forces had to exist as they now do for there to come into existence protons, neutrons, electrons, and a few nuclei of helium and lithium. Given the enormous pressures and tempretures of the environment (boundary) of the big bang in its first seconds, the building block particles where the expression of the settings. Given 14 billion years of evolution, we have the universe of today, an expression of the same settings. Up to a point.
If the Conservation of Information theorem is correct the information respresented by cosmological structure or molecules had to be put into the universe as it has evolved over time, or it had to be there at its beginning. Cosmologists today mostly believe that this information was in fact all present from the beginning, or at least within a few microseconds of the big bang. Physics and cosmology has convincingly shown the settings plus gravity explain the present structure of the cooled down universe. Granting that all of this information was present at or near the beginning from where did it come?
At first cosmologists thought perhaps the values had to be what they now are; not arbitrary but rather forced out of the boundary condition of the big bang. But a hundred years of theoretical effort to derive them has failed to prove the necessity of these particular values. The now fashionable answer is the values sprang (quickly evolved) into their values purely by accident, by sheer coincidence. Recognizing the improbability of this, cosmology and physics have spawned many theories of multiuniverses (Max Tegmark "Our Mathematical Universe" 2014) in which the settings take on all manner of random values. The idea is that given billions of such universes, it is not inconceivable that one would occur in which the settings took the values we observe. That they did so here makes the eventual appearance of observers possible and it should not be surprising that observers find themselves existing in such an unlikely universe. This idea, called the "Anthropic Principle" (Brandon Carter Krakow symposium 1973, Barrow and Tipler "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle" 1987), must be at least trivially true. Since we exist, it must be possible for us to exist within the constraints (remember information restricts possibilities) of the cosmological settings.
Of course there are plausible "intelligent alternatives". God might have constrained the settings to obtain the physical universe we occupy, a physical universe supporting eventual life and consciousness. A few honest physicists have noted the unlikeliness of the settings would not be surprising if there is a God. Besides God, the intelligent alternatives coming from science have tended to pure science fiction speculation of super-aliens (effectively demigods) or perhaps computer simulations (also implying super-aliens). Such speculative alternatives all involve beings like ourselves only having far advanced cognitive abilities and technology. Such beings either live with us in our universe or inhabit their own universe outside our own. Either way, all the cosmological origin questions remain. But multiuniverse theories require only more physics; perhaps other physical universes of some sort. This is why the science community prefers such otherwise unverifiable speculations. But they are not better explanations. They do not, for example, extend to consciousness very well.
There is something more to notice about information re-expression based solely on the settings and evolving boundary conditions. All of these expressions, that is everything governed primarily by gravity as the source of negative energy, electromagnetism, or nuclear forces are repeating structures. Every proton is identical to every other proton, and all the galaxies, while differing widely in specific shape and size are gravitationally bound rotating collections of stars very often influenced by a large central black hole (dark matter is a part of the boundary conditions forming and maintaining these structures). If you consider any given cubic meter of a star's interior at some distance between its center and periphery, it is much like any other cubic meter of that same star at the same distance from the center.
At almost the opposite end of universal size scales, the most informationally complex structures are homogeneous crystals and relatively simple organic molecules like amino acids which themselvs will form crystal structures under the right boundary conditions. There is a large negative entropy difference between a freely floating gas of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, and an amino-acid composed of those same elements. But that reduction, purchased in the molecular case with the energy of electrostatic bonds, is nothing more than a structure that arises automatically thanks to the settings under particular boundary conditions. From the crystallization of water (ice) to the formation of amino-acids, as with gravity, entropy reduction is associated only with the production of regular repeating structures whose variation depends solely on the nature of the settings and boundary conditions which are themselves the result of the setting and their own larger-scale boundary conditions.
This situation changes dramatically when we look at life. Galaxy formation, stars, and amino acids are an immediate response to entropy reduction caused directly by gravity or electrostatic forces under specific conditions. Once any of these arise they become stable. Only changing boundary conditions alter their stable states. Even dynamic but presently stable stars are in a stable equilibrium condition with pressure balancing gravity.
But living systems differ from any nonliving information expressions in several ways. Their stability is never merely a simple equilibrium, but rather the product of many interactions dynamically reducing entropy in the living organism over all. Of course living processes cause entropy increase in the environment, the boundary within which life operates, and there are living processes that spend heat in support of neg-entropic mechanism. Life exhibits a persistent battle against entropy and is never in internal equilibrium. If a living organism comes to complete equilibrium, or its entropic activity dominates, the organism dies. More importantly, life's neg-entropy mechanisms achieve their effect not by the simple surrender to the consequences of the settings but rather to active mechanisms that map or translate information from one form into another. Living systems are filled with little engines that map information from one form into another reducing entropy in the system over all as a by-product. No comparable mechanisms exist in the nonliving cosmos.
The most familiar of these living mechanisms is the multistep interaction chain, associated with many intermediate structures themselves built up out of the same process, of mapping information in DNA to proteins. Obedient to the Conservation of Information theorem, this creates no new information. Rather, information is mapped from one expression to another. But the mechanism itself, a mapping engine, is new. None of this works apart from the limits imposed by the settings. But unlike stars, life's entropy reduction is not a direct outcome of the settings, but of an entropy reducing transfer of information from one form to another.
The complexity of life frames a further limit on the space of possibility within the restriction imposed by the settings. It amounts to new information besides the settings alone. A protein's biological functionality is not merely the result of its electostatic forces, but also its physical shape. True, the shape is the result of electrostatic forces, but an identically force-balanced molecule of a different shape will not work. Many differently shaped molecules might have identical force balances. The biological activity of a particular shape is a restriction not found in the settings alone. Life's information is a restriction on top of a restriction and that demands more information. Where did this more come from?
Once again science, this time biology down through chemistry to physics, declares that it was all, like the settings, a lucky accident. Yes, they admit, unlikely, but not impossible and if it hadn't happend on Earth, we would not be around to comment on it. In his first two books, Dembski explains just how unlikely such an accidental assembly is; thousands of different translations, hundreds of thousands of molecular arrangements, functioning as an integrated system, a living organism. In his third book Dembski argues that the information difference between nonliving processes and the simplest conceivable life (simpler than anything we find on Earth today) could not possibly come to exist accidentally. If life's arrangement cannot be a direct product of the settings alone (the only information present in the big bang and throughout the evolution of the nonliving cosmos) its accidental appearance would be a violation of the Conservation of Information principle. What Dembski misses (at least I do not remember him mentioning it) is that life's entropy reduction mechanism, complexity translation, is nowhere else exhibited in the interactions of the nonliving cosmos. From intergalactic clusters to amino acids none of the accumulated information is carried through translation mechanisms. It is all the immediate expressions of the settings under specific conditions.
For science to declare the one "life origin" event we know of is an accidental product of the settings plus boundary conditions directly is question begging and most scientists know this. "Accidental" is not a valid generalization from a single observation. Even if life on Earth originated on Mars (some cosmologists do assert this is a possibility), the question of how Mars' life began still stands. Plausibly however, life-harboring planets around other stars are effectively isolated from one another. Life on such worlds originates and evolves independently.
What a discovery of genuine life on the planets of other stars would mean depends on what we find. Finding something indisputably alive but much simpler than the simplest life on Earth, would lend credence to the view that initial assembly might be accidental. Perhaps some life is so simple (something true also of long vanished early life on Earth) that it is not so unlikely after all. But if what we find on one or even dozens of other worlds is that all life is complex, different perhaps but on the same order of complexity as the simplest life on Earth, the hypothesis of "accidental appearance" gets all the more problematic. If, as Dembski claims, the chance of life springing into being accidentally on Earth is 1 x 10^-150, it is half as likely to have happened twice, let alone multiple times.
The rest of Dembski's argument is straightforward. Human beings, observers in the universe, know of (that is experience and observe) only one source of new information in the universe; intelligent agency. For materialists to claim that this too, that is what we experience subjectively as intelligent agency, is nothing more than an outcome of the settings and boundary conditions, begs the same question as regards life. The "only example one has" of anything cannot be the ground of a valid inductive generalization. If the only life we ever find is complex enough to be highly unlikely there are only three possibilities. The absurdly unlikely happened, there is something fundamental that we are missing in physics, or life's information came from the outside, from intelligent agency. In all my writing including this essay I have taken for granted there is not something fundamental missing in physics.
Physics may not be finished thanks to the problem of unifying gravity and quantum mechanics, but it has nailed a few fundamentals. It has adequately dispensed with the idea there is an "invisible force" that pushes physical regularity toward the assembly of living information. We find nothing of this in classical physics or quantum mechanics. If physics is correct as concerns its own causal closure, then life's information had to be added at a place and time when boundary conditions were supportive. If some intelligent agency acted at life's origin (perhaps on many worlds) then the same agency's action, to fix the settings, at the big bang would not be at all surprising. The settings are fixed as they are in support of [eventual] developing boundary conditions conducive to life's origination.
This notion must also apply to life's evolution on Earth to the point of emerging consciousness, and in particular a personal consciousness (discussed at length in other essays on the blog). Over a mere 3 billion years an amazing quantity of new information (Kolmogorov complexity) assembles from primitive cells to organisms having subjective experience. Subjectivity at least begins with the higher animals, but it makes the transition into "observer status" only in human beings. Animals observe their environment in the sense of integrating sensory experience in a subjective gestalt. But being an OBSERVER implies more than mere observation, it implies recognition of meaning implicit in observation but not of the observation as such. This brings me to final consideration of semantic information.
Semantic information, taken most broadly, is prelinguistic, but not preconscious. A lion easily distinguishes between a zebra and the tree next to it. It grasps the zebra is potential food and the tree is not. The discrimination between zebra and tree has meaning to lion consciousness. Given memory and subjective experience an association links 'zebra' to the relief of hunger. Semantic information is transferred not by translation from one physical carrier to another, but from some such physical state to a subject. Meaning is meaning to a subject. Compared to biological information, semantic information is one step further removed from the settings. Many discrete sets of biophysical states ground a particular persisting consciousness, while different conscious experiences follow from similar biophysical states. Semantic information is largely independent of the physics underlying it and exists only to consciousness.
The uncoupling of semantic information from physical information continues in human consciousness. A zebra means [potential] food to a lion whether it is hungry at the moment or not. Both lions and humans apprehend meanings in this way, we are after all animals. But human beings not only apprehend meanings, they also abstract and evaluate them. Abstraction and evaluation combine to suggest meanings not immediately apprehended. This (and our volitional power to control our bodies) underlies our capacity to put new information into the world, literally to pattern matter-energy restricting its future potentials. Humans alone are capable of adding information, arising in subjective abstractions, to the world. Lions are not. We create art, and airplanes. Flying airplanes are like biological activity in the outcomes of information mapping engines. A successful mapping creates not only a biologically active molecule, but one that functions in a role specified by biological demands. A flying airplane signals a successful combination of semantic information and physics (purposeless mechanisms resting on the settings) whose proper role is specified by subjective intent to build a flying machine.
In a living cell there is nothing in the chain of events from DNA to a shaped protein that relies on anything other than the basic forces whose fundamental information, present at the big bang, is the settings. In this case, the electrostatic forces are dominant, but everything has its effect on the outcome. There does not appear to be anything in life that originates outside the physical world. As with the settings, once information is put in somewhere, life's day-to-day operation exhibits nothing but outcomes explained by the forces (settings), and boundaries now including life, that cell, itself. But life's delicately balanced self-maintenance does not address the issue of how its information originates. If the Conservation of Information theorem is true, then not only was its accidental assembly unlikely, it is impossible.
Individuals are free, of course, to believe life's origin and evolution was accidental. But the argument that they were nothing of the kind is clearly plausible, even reasonable compared with much speculation from materialists. When we arrive at human beings, a new power springs from life through consciousness. Not only is there a mapping from some physical "state of affairs" to a meaning apprehended in consciousness, but uniquely, humans can map abstract meanings from consciousness to the world. Abstraction capable language marks the final separation between information and the settings.
The word 'palo' in Spanish means 'tree' in English. Either might refer to some particular tree or to the class or kind 'tree', and both are equally compatible with the settings and boundary conditions up through all of biology. All human languages are of course compatible with human biology everywhere on Earth. Expressing a single abstract meaning in different languages demonstrates the complete decoupling of semantic meaning from the settings. Completing the decoupling begun with life and continued in animal consciousness grounds both human free will and our power to create information.
This capacity, the free-willed intelligent creation (by arrangement of matter-energy) of new information, demands new information. If everything that happens in the universe expresses information, such novel power rests on information not previously present; information added not to matter-energy directly, but to consciousness. I go into what this implies in more detail in my books and the blog essay "Why Personality?"
All the information from the settings to life, supposing they come from outside physics, might conceivably (however implausibly) be the work of aliens, or perhaps we live in a computer simulation. Consciousness poses a special problem because unlike the universe and life, it is plausibly both real and nonmaterial. A corollary of life's physical nature is that living process isn't intrinsically conscious. Nothing about biology, however complex, suggests an emergence of subjective experience. It isn't clear that any subjectivity can emerge from a causally closed physics; not even accidentally given infinite time! Human consciousness poses an additional problem. Even the highest animal consciousness does not display an ability to configure the world in novel ways based on new meanings conceived first (and not merely apprehended) in consciousness!
Human beings can shape the world based on thoughts whose origin has little direct connection to immediate sensory experience or memory. Of course our creative thinking includes apprehended meaning. But human creativity goes beyond experience to first postulate new, associative meanings, and then test their validity (truth content) by configuring physical subsystems that function (like shaped proteins) in their intended roles. Art, philosophy, and technology are all predicated on the validity of meanings originating in consciousness.
If aliens did this, from life (at least) to subjectivity capable of original creation, directly or in a computer simulation, they would stand in relation to us much as religion's claims for God. Not entirely, for it is not an entailment of the alien hypothesis that aliens be for example omnipotent. If however we live in the matrix, a computer simulation, then omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence within the context of the program are reasonable inferences.
If the aliens are a product of this universe, the matter of the settings, and how the alien life started and evolved, appears. The alien hypothesis settles no philosophical issues. If aliens created the universe itself, and it is not a simulation then their universe must be something outside, apart from the physical as we see it from inside our universe. Even if one insists this outside is physical it cannot be "our physical". There must, in this view, still be something outside our universe. But none of this matters because if any of these speculations are even remotely true, then something or someone added information, at least beginning with life if not the big bang, to the universe, our universe! It doesn't matter if the agency is divine or not or if the information came from aliens inside or outside the universe. It isn't necessary to assume that this agency must be purposefully intelligent. But evidence at least suggests that it exhibits all the characteristics of purposeful intelligence as we observers experience it.
If any of this speculation is true, physics must still give up the idea that "no such information came from anywhere". There is some irony here. The speculation taken most seriously by the materialist community is that all we know as our world was genuinely an accident; precisely the "no information from anywhere" hypothesis. The irony is that this hypothesis is the one least supported by all the evidence, even the purely material evidence of life. Life is the first, partial decoupling from the settings. That decoupling depends on information not present in the settings. If the Conservation of Information theorem is true, life's information had to come from somewhere other than physics.
There is nothing in physics, nothing in the strict causal closure of the physical that is incompatible with information coming in from the outside. Purposeless mechanism (a valid insight of physics) and purposeful information added by an intelligent, at least intelligent seeming, source are not incompatible. This is almost a trivial truth as concerns human experience. We configure purposeless mechanism (mechanism of the physical world) with our own purposes all the time. Our entire technological history not to mention art, science, and philosophy begin with that ability. If physics and intelligent agency get along as we experience them, and if our universe is everywhere basically the same, there is no reason to insist that agency characteristic of intelligence did not add information to the universe possibly starting with the big bang. Only an agency outside the universe explains everything, where all the information came from, including the universe, the settings. Physics cannot address itself to the nature of that agency because whether it is physical or not, it is not a part of our universe.
By Quine Atalin Philosophy February 10, 2017 February 10, 2017 5,884 WordsLeave a comment


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31235 / Sealdah - Barrackpore Local
सियालदह - बैरकपुर लोकल
Total Halts: 7
The following table shows the schedule of 31235/Sealdah - Barrackpore Local including timing along with its arrival and departure time at each station with Platform number. The distance column shows the distance traveled by the train from its starting point from Sealdah
Arrives @ 15:30 (Barrackpore)
Search: SDAH BP
Arr. at BP
Sealdah - Barrackpore Local (31235) Schedule
31235 / Sealdah - Barrackpore Local (सियालदह - बैरकपुर लोकल) train operated by the Eastern Railway which runs between Sealdah and Barrackpore. The train leaves from Sealdah Daily at 14:50 hrs and reaches Barrackpore at 15:30 hrs
The train, during its journey from Sealdah, crosses 7 railway station and terminates at Barrackpore. It takes 40 minutes for this train to complete its entire journey of 23 kilometers.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Lessons Learned From the 2019 NHL Draft
By Peter F.@pflynn42 Jan 29, 2020, 7:18am CST
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Photo by Jeanine Leech/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
On the evening of June 21, 2019, Red Wings fans worldwide sat in front of their television to see which top prospect would don the winged wheel. The team would pick 6th, and after consensus top two selections Jack Hughes and Kaapo Kakko were selected, Detroit would have their pick of several exciting young forwards.
A certain writer, who will remain nameless, also sat down to watch. This writer had spent a great deal of time researching the players likely to be available and talking to writers that spend the year watching prospects.
Earlier that day, JD Burke had tweeted out that Detroit was reportedly really interested in some defenseman named Moritz Seider. Seider was thought to be a late first round pick by most, so our intrepid writer dismissed it out of hand.
Fast forward to the moments following Detroit's surprising pick. They actually did select Seider at 6th overall. The writer was stunned. But additionally, for some reason, he was angry. That doesn't really make sense, right? He wrote an article blasting the pick and lashed out at commenters when they disagreed.
People who were readers of this site at that time know that, of course, I am the writer to whom I am referring. In the days that followed, I tried to figure out why anger was the emotion that rose to the surface, when it seems so out of place.
The short version is that I had spent so much time and energy trying to learn about the different prospects, and it felt like, in the end, it didn't matter. I felt at the time that it was all a waste, and there was no point in trying to learn about the different prospects. That might not really make sense, but emotions aren't always logical.
Additionally, I think I was trying to guard against blindly trusting new general manager Steve Yzerman. Combine these two things, and you get the bulk of my reaction. It was still wrong, obviously, and if I could do it all over again, I would in a heartbeat. I did say that night that I would be ecstatic if I was wrong, and it's looking very much like Seider will be a very good, if not great addition to Detroit's blueline in the near future.
It's always a good idea to reflect on things that happen to learn how to do better the next time. The rest of this article will be an attempt to lay out a more effective way to spend the time leading up to the 2020 draft.
I reached out to three people to get their input:
Prashanth Iyer, who in the last year has started to focus on prospects. He had a prospect model last year that he made public before the draft.
Dylan Galloway, the Head Scout for Eastern Canada for the draft site Future Considerations.
Will, who runs the site Scouching. Will watches video of prospects and combines that with statistical analysis. Will does not use his last name publicly.
Lesson One - No Matter How Much Work You Do, It's Impossible To Have a Complete Picture
Even people writing about prospects who are able to talk to the people evaluating prospects for NHL teams don't have all the information. If you read a quote that Team X is really looking hard at Player Y, that could be entirely accurate. It could also be misinformation that Team X is giving to a reporter to keep other teams from knowing what they are really thinking.
Basically, it's always important to keep in mind that teams control what information gets reported, and that's for nationally known reporters who have a plethora of contacts.
For everyone else, it's even harder. Even if every major prospect writer had the exact same ranking for the top 10 picks, it's never going to go in that order. Teams each have their own draft boards, and it's not uncommon for a team to have a player ranked very highly on their board who is ranked far lower on another team's board. Reporting following the 2019 draft indicated that Detroit was not the only team that had Seider much higher than the general consensus.
I asked Prashanth for his thoughts on the difficulty of trying to predict prospects based on publicly available data:
I think the main difficulty are the data available. Across leagues, the information available to the public is inconsistent and often far less than we need to paint an accurate picture of a player. Often times, comparisons across leagues are based on league strength, age, player height, player weight, goals, assists, and points. That doesn't mean it's impossible to do great work with prospect data. There's a laundry list of people such as Iain Fyffe, Rhys Jessop, Josh Weissbock, Cam Lawrence, Jeremy Davis, Garret Hohl, Namita Nandakumar, Hayden Speak, Evan Oppenheimer, and Emmanuel Perry who have done outstanding work with the available prospect data.
However, I believe that the accuracy and precision of prospect models are ultimately limited by the available data and are generally better utilized to identifying potential over- or underperformers as opposed to generating a pure ranking list.
I'm going to come back to that last point later.
Additionally, when trying to predict where players will go, even early on in the draft, it's important to remember that each team is different. Not every team has the same draft philosophy. As part of his job, Dylan Galloway participates in mock drafts, so I asked him what he takes into consideration when doing that:
From the outside looking in, a team's draft history tells you not only a bit about things that they value in a player, but also which are their more strongly covered regions. For mock drafts, my personal approach is to take into account a team's recent history, at least as much as I can from public information, as well as looking from the perspective of team needs and depth at each position. At the same time, mocks are an opportunity for a me as a scout to add my own opinion on the order of the draft and take a player that I personally like, or feel is the best player available higher than the consensus might have them.
From talking to Dylan previously for the Fer Sure podcast, I know that there can be some difficulty in making one list for the site that combines the opinions of different scouts from different regions. Imagine if we took 30 people, who were each equally qualified to evaluate NHL talent, and had each watch one different NHL team for a period of time. If we then brought them all together and asked them to make a combined ranking of the players they watched, it's easy to see why that would be difficult. It's similarly difficult for the people at Future Considerations to do, and teams have to attempt to do the same thing. As Dylan says:
Comparing players from different regions is fairly difficult, and we generally defer to the people in that region. We will always weight in-rink views more heavily than video viewings of players. For comparing players across leagues on a skill basis, we take into account the context of their playing situation to help adjust where they fall among players of similar skill. What I mean by that is, Euro prospects could be playing fewer minutes, getting fewer points than players of similar skill in the OHL. Understanding which players are succeeding in "easier" vs "harder" leagues is a small piece that can be added to the puzzle to provide an overall picture of each player. International tournaments like the Hlinka, WJC, WJAC, 5 Nations, and U18s are an excellent opportunity for cross checking views, which can really help our scouts gauge the skill level of players in their own region.
If it's hard for people who watch these players, there shouldn't be an expectation that a writer can do this with any level of certainty.
This leads to another related point:
Lesson 2 - Attempting to Predict the Order of Players Outside of the Top One or Two is an Exercise in Futility
Don't get me wrong: mock drafts are fun. There is definitely some value to them as well. At the same time, for the reasons mentioned above, you have to know going in that they are attempting to do something that is pretty close to impossible.
Because of this, I have become a proponent of a tiering system when evaluating prospects. I think it's a much better way of looking at these players heading into the draft.
Additionally, even though I am personally a proponent of taking the best player available, regardless of position, teams sometimes value position more. If a team is confident that they have a solid defensive corps for years to come, they may take a forward over a defenseman, even if that forward may be considered not as good as the defenseman. They could also think that the forward IS the best player available.
Lesson 3 - Watching Players Live Is Important
While Will does see some prospects play live, much of his experience watching players is through video. With technology getting better each season, people increasingly have the ability to watch many prospects without leaving their house.
It seems pretty obvious that watching a player in person gives one insight that is impossible to get otherwise. It's also pretty obvious that it's cost-prohibitive for the vast majority of people to pay out of pocket to see a large number of these prospects live, especially outside of tournaments and showcases.
I asked Will what he thinks people miss out on by watching players on video as opposed to in person:
You get a real sense of pace watching a game live. I find that TV often slows down the pace of the game in my mind, and going in person helps you really discern who's really moving out there and who isn't. I also find that I miss a lot of details that might not happen on camera. Where are defender's positioned? How are they anticipating breakouts? How is their mobility patrolling bluelines? Watching live gives you a quick scan of who's on the ice doing what at all times which many broadcasts just can't provide through no fault of their own.
Lesson 4 - The Best Results Will Come From Combining Data and Watching Players
As Prashanth said above, there are people doing good work with prospect statistics. A common fallacy I've seen when discussing the concept of using analytics to evaluate a player is that sometimes people treat it as an either/or. Statistics and watching players are both valuable, and each relies on the other to give one a full picture of a player.
Prashanth mentioned in the previous quote that rather than using statistics to create a ranked list, prospect models are "generally better utilized to identifying potential over- or under-performers."
I asked Will what he thought about this idea.
I'd argue that yes, it can be used to identify players later. Video and data gives you the ability to identify players who are objectively playing the game well i.e. driving scoring, suppressing goals against, involving themselves in offense, etc. From there, you can check out those players to track their data and apply your "eye test" to see HOW objectively positive results are generated.
There are plenty of guys who have high production who don't work out, and in my experience, video is a great way to explore why that might be. The opposite is also true. There are players who have excellent data but their production isn't great, so exploring why that might be can lead you to value them properly, be it positive or negative.
There is always talent that slips, especially overseas. People are still really sleeping on the Finnish, Swedish and even Russian junior leagues. They're fast, skilled, high pace leagues and the players may be getting experience playing against men, which is highly valuable to me.
Most late round picks don't work out anyway, and my argument is always that if normal teams land 1.5 full time players from a draft on average, they've done great. If I can land 2.5, I'm still missing on 5 picks a year, but results are almost twice as positive which has major advantages on the NHL roster.
Data and video gives you easily accessible tools to get a good feel for the talent out there that people might be sleeping if they don't lean on the tech they can access easily.
Prashanth has similar thoughts about how best to use data to evaluate prospects:
I think the best recommendation I can give is to use the data to guide who to scout when considering players outside of the top-30 to top-40. There are thousands upon thousands of players eligible for each draft and it's impossible for a scout to see them all.
I think scouting assessments are incredibly important, but I think it's ultimately difficult to see all of the players necessary and form purely objective opinions based on the small samples they'll have for certain players. They may only get to see a player 1 or 2 times and maybe he/she had an off game that night and didn't perform as well as he/she could.
This is where I think adoption of prospect analytics is beneficial. If a player consistently stands out from a statistical standpoint, then they are a player that warrants further investigation. I think scouts that do this will ultimately get a more complete picture and will be able to form a more objective rank list.
So while more information than ever before is available on prospects, the overall lesson I have learned from last year's draft is that while you as a fan of a team may think that your team should draft a certain player, take a step back and remember that evaluating prospects is very tough even for those best at it.
So, while a pick might not seem to make sense, the best option is to try to figure out why that selection was made. Of course, it could end up being a bad selection, but it's definitely a good idea to not form any definite opinions right away.
Draft night is not a great time to make a strong judgment of your team's selections. It's a good thing that nobody around here would make that mistake (again).


Under financing of Municipal development fund of Georgia, construction of dormitory for 320 students with appropriate infrastructure was implemented at Nutsubidze Plateau, adjacent to Lisi Lake, on plot with area 15653m 2. Design was elaborated by Artstudio Project. It should be noted, that according to international practice, students dormitory is usually located in the vicinity of universities to avoi students from traffic expenses. In our case, dormitory is intended for socially deprived students from different universities; accordingly, it is not necessary to locate design building near to any university. The complex consists of 3 dwelling blocks and administrative building. The yard is fenced, conventionally divided into three parts – active (administrative-public and sport), dwelling (3 blocks) and leisure (improved yard) zones. Administrative building will accommodate offices, library, conference hall, medical room and café for 150 people. All parts of the complex are adapted for disabled persons.


Genuine Human Being – Conscious Cancer® Online Course - Are you addicted to adrenaline?
Are you addicted to adrenaline?
Home/Uncategorized/Are you addicted to adrenaline?
My dear friend, Manuel Schoch, spent most of his life, helping people and himself to find "inner freedom".
On his journey, he observed, accurately, that the main obstacle to experiencing this illusive inner freedom, is fundamentally fear.
We all know this. The biological component that reinstates fear is our addiction to adrenaline!
Our minds and bodies cannot be separated, they work as a unit. And our minds are programmed for survival at all costs in all circumstances.
Our minds constantly need action to give us an illusionary feeling that we are awake and alive. When we feel awake, we increase adrenaline production. Media, tv, films increase our adrenaline levels. Worrying about unreal problems increases our adrenaline!
Addictive behaviour patterns are rooted to our adrenaline addiction.
We're living and recreating a world of adrenaline junkies!
How do we free ourselves of this addiction?
By relaxing and stilling the mind, of course.
Meditation and relaxation processes help us to "get out of our mind's mechanisms" for sure.
In addition, we can also biochemically balance adrenaline levels, so that our body can support our mind to relax faster and to stay in that space of relaxation for longer.
The longer our body stays in a relaxed state, our mind can calm down and feel safe.
When we feel safe, we allow the natural thriving mechanisms within our system to take control.
Easy, natural solutions appear to problems that seemed unsurmountable without adrenaline!
Many of my clients and patients find meditative and relaxation processes challenging because of their fast paced outer lives.
There are other ways to "slow down" the mind.
The simplest way, is to talk to other people. Especially people that are different from us. When we talk to others we learn how to listen, how to be patient, how to be quiet, and we learn how to share.
This physical sharing is a very different experience, than sharing over social media or even over the phone. It's more genuine and real!
There are, of course, a variety of herbs and homeopathic, natural remedies to help overcome fear and anxieties.
Email me at drsangeetasahi@gmail.com for an appointment to find the right ones for you.


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UPDATE: The Maple Shade Police Chaplain Corp which has been in existence since 2015 is currently comprised of 7 Chaplains. The 6 original Chaplains are: Chaplain Vince McDonald, Chaplain Greg Ginion, Chaplain Anne Marie Cook, Chaplain Mike Stinsman, Chaplain Evelyn Galloway and Chaplain Joe Domosh. Recently added into the Chaplain Corp is Chaplain Larry Sernovitz. The Chaplain Corp has several primary functions, first of which is to come along side and care for our police officers and first responders. The Chaplains also work extensively in the community responding to calls for service when needed by the agency for incidents such as death investigations of all kinds, death notifications, large scale fires, serious and fatal crashes just to name a few.
The Chaplains also work with our School Resource Officer, School District and Municipal Board in diverting youth from the Juvenile Justice System by utilizing the Stationhouse Adjustment Program. The Chaplain Corp has been a wonderful addition to our agency and currently have partnered with PBA Local #267 in providing Resiliency training to the spouses, significant others and family members of our officers. Additionally, the Chaplains also partner with Chief Christopher Fletcher in hosting the annual National Night Out event each August which has grown immensely since its inception. The event serves to bring our police and first responders together with our community building bridges and improving communication in our town. We are thankful for their dedication and tireless support of the Maple Shade Police Department and to the community of Maple Shade.
Chief Gary Gubbei and the Maple Shade Police Department are proud to announce the formation of a Police Chaplain Corp. The primary function of the Police Chaplain Corp is to assist the police department in its service to the community, the employees of the police department and the township alike. Chaplains are made up of pastors from local religious organizations within the township and surrounding areas. Chaplain Liaison Officer Captain Chris Fletcher has been working with the local religious leaders since the fall of 2014 in preparation of bringing the program on-line by October 2015.
To become a Chaplain, religious leaders needed to attend 16 hours of educational classes that focus on the Chaplain's role, duties and responsibilities within the community and within the police department itself. Further, these leaders also attended 16 hours of training focusing on Group Crisis Intervention Training to work with local Police, Fire and EMS personnel following a tragic or devastating event. It allows the Chaplains an opportunity to work with our first responders by providing a format to share their feelings and experiences during these difficult times in a productive way to ensure their well-being both physically and mentally. In addition to this training, Captain Fletcher has conducted extensive training with the Chaplains in all areas of police work culminating with their official swearing in by Mayor Claire Volpe on Thursday September 24, 2015 at 7pm in council chambers.
The following religious leaders are Chaplains with the Maple Shade Police Department: Pastor Vince McDonald, Asst. Pastor Greg Ginion, Deacon Brian Ball (all from Immanuel Baptist Church), Pastor Annemarie Cook (Holy Trinity Lutheran Church), Deacon Mike Stinsman (Our Lady of Perpetual Help) and Rabbi Joe Domosh (Congregation Ner Tamid).
Additionally, Sister Evelyn Galloway (Our Lady of Perpetual Help) also recently joined the Chaplain Program and is a welcome addition to the team. Her years of experience and leadership in service to the community has been an inspiration to the other Chaplains and Sister Evelyn has proven to be an asset to the original group.
In addition to the creation of the Chaplain program with the police department, Captain Fletcher and Chaplain McDonald also set up a non-profit 501c (3) corporation for the Chaplains to utilize in an effort to raise funds for the program without relying on the tax payers for revenue. Chaplain McDonald is the Executive Director of the Maple Shade Police Chaplain's Association – A NJ Non-Profit Corporation. Pastor McDonald and Captain Fletcher wish to extend their appreciation and gratitude for the support they and the Chaplains have received from the Maple Shade Township Council and all of our Community Partners. This would not have been possible without them!
If you are a local religious leader and would like to inquire about joining the Maple Shade Police Chaplain Corp, please contact Captain Chris Fletcher at #856-779-9610 extension #116. If you would like to support the Chaplain Program and their work with a financial donation, please contact Chaplain Vince McDonald of the Maple Shade Police Chaplain's Association at #856-779-1807.


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Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will travel to Norway next week to attend the 2016 edition of the Oslo Forum, an annual international conference on armed conflict mediators and peace process actors.
He will join an estimated 100 other prominent mediators and peace process players from around the world on June 14 and 15 to share experience of peacemaking, Tasnim News Agency reported.
The forum is organized jointly by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, a private diplomacy and conflict mediation organization.
It annually brings together senior conflict mediators, major players in peace processes, key decision-makers and eminent thinkers to reflect on current peace processes and to strengthen the practice of conflict mediation internationally.
Other participants at the gathering will include US Secretary of State John Kerry and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission Federica Mogherini.
United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Jan K. Eliasson as well as the foreign ministers of Kenya, Lebanon, Mongolia and New Zealand will also attend.
The two-day event will feature panel discussions, debates and roundtable sessions on a variety of topics.
It is not still clear whether or not Zarif will hold meetings with Kerry and Mogherini on the sidelines of the conference to discuss the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the official name of the July 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France and Germany).
While the JCPOA came into force in January, some Iranian officials have complained about the US failure to fully implement the accord.
In an interview with Tasnim News Agency in April, Mogherini said the EU has been holding talks with the US to remove the obstacles in the way of banks trying to get into Iran after implementation of the nuclear deal.
Back in March, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said Americans have yet to fulfill what they were supposed to as per the nuclear deal.
Iran still has problems in its banking transactions and in restoring its frozen assets because western countries and those involved in such processes are afraid of the Americans, the Leader said at the time, criticizing Washington for its covert moves to prevent Iran from taking advantage of the sanctions relief as enshrined in the landmark nuclear agreement.


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The City of College Station is updating its Comprehensive Plan
The City of College Station is updating its Comprehensive Plan and would like to gather public input. Please follow the link below to see how you can participate both virtually and in person.
https://www.cstx.gov/cms/one.aspx?portalId=12410917&pageId=17889120
Greens Prairie Reserve - Notice of Open Board Meeting
Notice of Open Board Meeting
Subject - Notice of Community Fences
Date: Thursday May 14, 2020
Location: Oldham Goodwin Offices (2800 S. Texas Avenue, Suite 401)
Oldham Goodwin
Greens Prairie Reserve Releases First Phase of Homesites in College Station
COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS — After 3 years of thoughtful planning, design, and development, Oldham Goodwin Group, LLC announces the debut of the first phase of homesites at Greens Prairie Reserve. This new 370-acre master-planned community located in south College Station, near the intersection of Highway 6 and TX-40/William D Fitch Pkwy will provide exceptional homes planned in a way to showcase the natural beauty of the surrounding land.
Arrington Road Entrance (rendering)
"This track of land is undeniably the best piece of real estate left in Brazos County for a master-planned residential development," said Casey Oldham, CEO of Oldham Goodwin Group. "Our long-term vision for Greens Prairie Reserve was to create a timeless and luxurious community that stood apart in quality, design, and privacy. We're proud to call College Station home and are ready for others to experience all that Greens Prairie Reserve will have to offer."
Greens Prairie Reserve is set in a landscape of heritage oak trees, grassy prairie land, and serene ponds. With over a third of the land dedicated to nature preservation and 20 to 30-foot natural privacy buffers between the back of homes, the community will feature over 12-miles of hike and bike trails intended to connect residents and promote an active lifestyle. Homeowners will also be able to enjoy pocket parks with natural playscapes, stocked ponds for fishing and boating, a community events pavilion, and an all-purpose sports field. Regularly scheduled events, classes, and activities will be facilitated year-round by an on-site lifestyle coordinator.
Located in the heart of the Texas Triangle, College Station was recently named the #1 Best Small Places of Business and Careers in Texas by Forbes and is the #4 Best Places to Live in Texas according to Livability. Greens Prairie Reserve is situated near one of the fastest-growing sections of the city and has easy access to shopping, dining, medical services, and is zoned to schools in the award-winning College Station Independent School District.
Construction on homes is expected to begin fall 2019 with a public grand opening scheduled to coincide with the 2020 Spring Parade of Homes™. To learn more about Greens Prairie Reserve please visit www.greensprairiereserve.com.


This is the fourth in a 14 part series at Big Peace which will detail the history, objectives, strategy, operational structure, modus operandi, and influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.
On a seemingly normal day on the outskirts of Annapolis, Maryland, a singular event led to the revelation of a deep-rooted enemy with a massive infrastructure inside the United States well on its way to achieving its goal of overthrowing the United States Constitution.
It is August 20, 2004. A Friday in the summertime, and the feds, lobbyists and businessmen chained to their desks in Washington, D.C. can't wait to bust out the doors and head to the beaches on the Eastern shore of Maryland and Delaware – Rehoboth, Bethany, Ocean City, and others. The traffic on Route 50 East on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge (Maryland) is picking up after the lunch hour, and will be ugly in a couple hours.
Westbound lanes, however, are pretty clear. Traveling on 50 West is a Baltimore County (MD) Marine Police unit carrying two officers. They are slowly overtaking a silver Infiniti sport utility vehicle when they notice the passenger is fully covered in what they believe is traditional Islamic garb. Her attire is not what gets their attention though – she is filming the support structures of the Bridge with a video camera. As they come alongside the vehicle she pulls the camera down, and resumes the filming when the police have passed. The officers catch that move. They notify the Maryland Transportation Authority (MTA) who has jurisdiction of the bridge. The officers conduct a vehicle stop at just about the time the MTA unit arrives on scene.
One of the three children in the vehicle, a daughter, will later tell how the police treated her family like animals, and she will complain that it was all so scary and….more propaganda.
The way this was handled was a fair reaction from law enforcement officers when we understand the driver of the vehicle was identified as Ismail Elbarasse – a Hamas operative (and, therefore, a Muslim Brother), wanted on a Material Witness warrant in a Hamas case out of Chicago. As more officers and the FBI are notified, the cops on scene realize there is something big going on. Why is a Hamas guy filming the support structures of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge? Investigators will later suggest that because of Al Qaeda's reduced ability to operate in the U.S. after 9/11, it was using other groups, like Hamas, to conduct pre-operational surveillance of its targets. What is most historically earth-shattering is what follows the car stop.
The FBI executes a search warrant of Elbarasse's home and vehicle in Annandale, Virginia. In the basement of the residence is a sub-basement. In the sub-basement, the archives of the Muslim Brotherhood are discovered. Historical documents, financial documents, strategic documents, organizational documents, and all kinds of other items are found among this incredible discovery.
Many of these documents will be entered into evidence at the largest successfully prosecuted terrorism financing and Hamas trial in U.S. history – US v Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (or "HLF" for short). These documents were stipulated to by the defense counsel, meaning there is no legal basis to contest their validity as being what they purport to be.
Holy Land Foundation was the largest Islamic non-profit in the United States and it was a Hamas entity.
The leaders of HLF were senior Hamas leaders.
Hamas was created out of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood.
There is a significant Muslim Brotherhood Movement in the United States which began in the 1950's.
The first national Islamic organization, the Muslim Students Association, was created by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The MB seeks to subordinate existing U.S. law to Shariah (Islamic Law) and re-establish the global Islamic State (Caliphate).
The most prominent Islamic organizations in North America are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood's Movement to include, but not limited to: Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), Muslim Students Association (MSA), International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) which was demonstrated to be a Hamas entity in the United States.
ISNA and NAIT are Hamas support entities.
ICNA is partnered with the Muslim American Society (MAS), and their training program to Muslims across North America includes the call to "wage war" against all systems of government not under Islamic rule, and calls Muslims to "hate and despise" all un-Islamic governments, among other things.
"Islamic Societies" and "Islamic Centers" across North America are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, meaning along with the mosques, non-profit organizations, lobbying groups, for-profit businesses, and the covert organizations controlled by the MB, the Muslim Brotherhood has thousands of entities in the U.S. at all levels of society working daily to bring Islamic law and Islamic rule to the United States.
What is most disturbing from this factual information is that federal agencies charged with the security of the United States, as well as state and local law enforcement organizations, have primarily worked with ISNA, CAIR, MSA, MAS or other hostile organization over the years – and continue to do so today. This creates a significant legal and practical danger to American citizens when the very agencies sworn to "protect and defend" are taking their advice from an enemy – the Muslim Brotherhood / Hamas / Al Qaeda – who has made their violent objectives crystal clear to anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear.
Even if someone chooses to believe the Muslim Brotherhood will never achieve its stated goals, what is clear is that the MB is well-organized, well led, well trained, well funded (primarily by Saudi Arabia), and has strategic objectives guided by tactical milestones to get them there. Across the United States, our state and federal officials are not even aware of the MB Movement here. While the MB might not achieve their objectives, the odds are heavily in their favor.


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Aphaenogaster beccarii é uma espécie de inseto do gênero Aphaenogaster, pertencente à família Formicidae.

beccarii
Insetos descritos em 1887

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia